I did a search on the Taxi forums to see if this topic was covered, and gleaned a lot of valuable info. Some of it was rather dated or spread out over multiple posts, so I'm thinking a new thread might not be a bad idea -- at least for me!

I've done my research on CD Baby, Tunecore, Reverbnation, Ditto Music, and DistroKid and because of my small catalog, need for a website, sales, and streaming services, I'm leaning heavily towards Reverbnation.

I'd really appreciate any input from this group before I make my final decision. Was there anything that you regret/would do differently with any of these services? Anything to watch out for? If you don't mind sharing, why did you go with one over another?

I'd like to thank you in advance for your input. It's always been a great value to me over the years!

Story time! I had a catchy song I wrote that got posted by a youtube music aggregation channel a few years ago (a channel similar to Trap Nation but smaller). Well, the video started getting tens of thousands of plays, and I realized I needed to upload it to Spotify. I decided on CD Baby's $15-per-song fee.

It ends up getting 150,000+ plays at first (CD Baby paid me like $500-ish), but then a few years later the song is only making me like $20 a year. Looking back, that Tunecore subscription actually wouldn't have been worth it for me, so I made the correct choice financially. If you don't have a lot of material to release and aren't expecting large amounts of regular listening traffic, that one-time $15/song fee (or cheaper when bundled as an album) really is the most profitable in cases where you're not getting millions of plays. When it comes to just having a place to put my music out there somewhere, I've always just used soundcloud since it's free and I can link friends to it since they're the only ones listening most of the time.

Story time! I had a catchy song I wrote that got posted by a youtube music aggregation channel a few years ago (a channel similar to Trap Nation but smaller). Well, the video started getting tens of thousands of plays, and I realized I needed to upload it to Spotify. I decided on CD Baby's $15-per-song fee.

It ends up getting 150,000+ plays at first (CD Baby paid me like $500-ish), but then a few years later the song is only making me like $20 a year. Looking back, that Tunecore subscription actually wouldn't have been worth it for me, so I made the correct choice financially. If you don't have a lot of material to release and aren't expecting large amounts of regular listening traffic, that one-time $15/song fee (or cheaper when bundled as an album) really is the most profitable in cases where you're not getting millions of plays. When it comes to just having a place to put my music out there somewhere, I've always just used soundcloud since it's free and I can link friends to it since they're the only ones listening most of the time.

That's really good info, thanks! I would really like to hear your YT song that got so many plays! Can you post the link?

Thanks for sharing this. Very good information. I actually did my homework before joining RVN, and much of it was from previous Taxi posts--so cheers to all those that pointed out that I don't want to relinquish any of my publishing (and I didn't/wouldn't).